Issue No. 22
by Marc Silverman
Disk Warrior 3.0.2: Rebuild & Conquer
Automated Newsletter Publication and Editize 2.0
The Cult of Mac: ?a book review
Monitor review: LaCie photon19vision
Software for the Way We Really Write
From My Keyboard? The Spring has Sprung Edition
Past Issues
Get me rewrite...
I've just finished proofreading this article, and I'm happy with the way it reads. It's about 10 paragraphs in length, all in unformatted text. I've gone into Photoshop to create the four images you'll see in the article, and the little 100x100-pixel icon that will be in the header at the top of the newsletter page. It took me my usual amount of time, about two hours, to get it all on paper and into image files in the raw form that the copy editor prefers.
A few months back, the next step would be for the text and pictures to go through a production process that included the copy editing, and then the complicated part—sending the files to the newsletter's web html person to turn them into the web page you're reading now. Along with that month's other six to eight articles, the job of publishing them could take a few days.
With no replacement in sight for our newsletter art director/web designer, production difficulties loomed. The hard-working group of volunteer copy editors and contributors was stretched to their limits.
Streamline the process...
Along with that month's other six to eight articles, and the Main Newsletter Page, and all of the associated images provided by the writers, the process of web designing, html coding, text revising, icon creating, and all of the unexpected glitches that will certainly arise, multiplied by the number of articles—well, just describing the involved process proves how labor-intensive it was.Start the Presses...
The Editize 2.0 type styling window replaces an ordinary html "textarea" field
This evening I visited the newsletter's private Admin page, logged in, and clicked to our newly programmed Newsletter Manager 1.0. I copied in my text, then used the built-in type formatting buttons to style the Title, Subheadings, and even paste in the catchy Sidebar text. I used the upload button to install the images in the places I want them, then took one last preview look at the page in progress. I fixed a couple of typos I missed, then pressed the "Save Article" link.
Voilá! I see exactly what you're seeing here: a fully-formatted web page for this article. It took me 12 minutes time from first accessing the Admin page, to clicking the link to publish the finished article. Multiply this 12 minutes by the six or eight articles in a typical issue and you'll see the entire building and posting of a monthly newsletter now takes about an hour and a half to two hours. And that includes the Main Newsletter Page, issue numbers and month stamps, rollover icons, and all the articles. Isn't technology marvelous!
I proposed an overall solution similar to the content-editing processes I had been building into client websites. I would develop and oversee the creation of a server-based database, and php programming processes to totally automate the newsletter production. Along with valuable input from Peter M. Fine and Rob Yasharian's page design, we worked up two page templates — a Main Page, and an Article Page — that served as the basis for the Newsletter Manager 1.0 project. Calling on Willie Sanchez, my colleague and php wizard, we planned out a way to turn the entire newsletter editing, page building, and actual publishing and posting online into a process that could be handled by as few as one non-technical person, or could be delegated to writers and copy editors alike to work together on a newsletter issue.
Research led to a Mac-friendly product called Editize 2.0. Essentially, Editize changes a typical html textarea (text-entry) field into a window providing type styling features, preset paragraph formats, image linking, alignment, and hyperlinks. It uses javascript, and provides an exact view, with formatting, of the article.
Enter ordinary text into the preset fields and Newsletter Manager 1.0 automatically builds the html page you're reading now
We determined the type styling for the other template elements of the article page—the bold red Sidebar, the White with Red Title design, the White byline—and created text fields for each. Typing or copying regular text into the field creates the styled text on the resulting page, as per the template.
Put the code to work...
Creating a new unpublished "working" newsletter is now a one-click operation
Lastly, and most importantly, Willie created the comprehensive programming that automated the posting of a new newsletter, including adding its name to the Pull-Down menu, moving the previous newsletters to lower positions on that pull-down, installing the Table of Contents on the Main Page and on all the Article pages, and accessing the icons for every article to install them into a Rollover Panel on the Main Page. The simplicity of using this automated programming truly belies the complex processes it's carrying out with just the touch of the "Publish Newsletter" button.
As of this writing, many of the newsletter staffers are using the combined Editize app and the Newsletter Manager 1.0 programming to stream through the process of getting the MetroMac newsletter onto your screens quickly and efficiently. Most readers wouldn't even know there was a difference—it's all behind the scenes technology turning a past process fraught with angst and annoyance into an easy-to-manage labor of love. And isn't that what computing is supposed to be anyway?
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Marc Silverman is the Director of Web Development for MetroMac, and produces, hosts, and maintains websites for local and nationwide firms. He strives to find ways to persuade technology to actually make things easier, not more complex.
• Full information and a demo of Editize 2.0 is available
from SitePoint PTY LTD.
Their website is http://www.editize.com/
• Info about the Newsletter Manager 1.0 programming
is available from the author.